1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to transmitting gestures in a chat session by participants communicating across a network of computers, and more specifically, to the use of a video camera to capture an actual physical gesture made by a participant, and automatically transmitting a textual or graphical representation of the captured gesture to the other participants in the chat session.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computational devices continue to proliferate throughout the world, there also continues to be an increase in the use of networks connecting these devices. Computational devices include large mainframe computers, workstations, personal computers, laptops and other portable devices including wireless telephones, personal digital assistants, automobile-based computers, etc. Such portable computational devices are also referred to as “pervasive” devices. The term “computer” or “computational device”, as used herein, may refer to any of such device which contains a processor and some type of memory.
The computational devices may be connected in any type of network including the Internet, an intranet, a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN). The networks connecting computational devices may be “wired” networks, formed using lines such as copper wire or fiber optic cable, wireless networks employing earth and/or satellite-based wireless transmission links, or combinations of wired and wireless network portions. Many such networks may be organized using a client/server architecture, in which “server” computational devices manage resources, such as files, peripheral devices, or processing power, which may be requested by “client” computational devices. “Proxy servers” can act on behalf of other machines, such as either clients or servers.
A widely used network is the Internet. The Internet, initially referred to as a collection of “interconnected networks”, is a set of computer networks, possibly dissimilar, joined together by means of gateways that handle data transfer and the conversion of messages from the sending network to the protocols used by the receiving network. When capitalized, the term “Internet” refers to the collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite or protocols.
Currently, the most commonly employed method of transferring data over the Internet is to employ the World Wide Web environment, referred to herein as “the Web”. Other Internet resources exist for transferring information, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity of the Web. In the Web environment, servers and clients effect data transfer using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a known protocol for handling the transfer of various data files (e.g., text, still graphic images, audio, motion video, etc.).
Electronic mail, or e-mail, is a frequently used feature of the Internet which allows the sending of messages to anyone connected to the Internet or connected to a computer network that has a connection to the Internet, such as an online service. An Internet e-mail message is sent, using the Internet's TCP/IP protocol, as a stream of packets, where each packet contains the destination address of a mail server used by the intended recipient. When all of the packets reach the destination address, the mail server recombines them into an e-mail message that a recipient can read when the recipient accesses the recipient's mailbox at the mail server.
A more immediate way to communicate with others over the Internet is to participate in a “live” chat session. As a participant enters text via a keyboard, other participants to the chat session can see the text being entered immediately. A protocol called Internet Relay Chat (IRC) can be used between an IRC client communicating with an IRC server on the Internet to effectuate a chat session. A participant using a client logs onto a server and selects a channel on which the participant wants to chat. As a participant types a message on a keyboard, the message, as it is being entered, is sent to the server. The server is part of a global IRC server network, and sends the message to the other servers which send the message to all of the others participating on the same channel. Other chat sessions can be effectuated without using the IRC protocol. For example, proprietary chat software can be used by individual Web sites to enable visitors to the site to communicate with each other in a live chat session.
Instant messaging is another way to communicate with other participants in “real time”. Instant messaging is different from the live chat sessions discussed above in that instant messaging enables a participant to communicate privately with another person. A user can create special lists of “buddies”. When a “buddy” comes on line, the other buddies are notified. They can then participate in communicating with each other.
It should be noted that although these “real time” forms of communicating are referred to as “chat” sessions; the communication is in the form of transferring inputted text, such as via a keyboard, and does not typically include “auditory”, i.e., voice, communication.
It is possible, however, to communicate in an auditory fashion over the Internet network, also. In this way, the sound of the participants' voices are broken down into packets which are then delivered using the Internet's TCP/IP protocols. Auditory communication over the Internet can be carried out in many ways. In one way, referred to as Internet telephony, the communication is made in a manner similar to a telephone, but the call is routed over the Internet instead of through the phone service. In another way, the communication is carried out through computers, connected to the Internet, having special hardware (e.g., microphones, speakers, etc.) and software. In this way, not only may audio communication be made, but text or graphics may also be sent between the participants using the computer's display monitor and other attached input and output devices. In addition, systems are also known in prior art to utilize a camera as a computer input device to communicate video images and audio over the Internet.
Regardless of these other types of video or audio communication means, the most prevalent communications means at the present time utilizes typed text such as is used in chat sessions or instant messaging as discussed above. The problem with typed text, however, is that all that is communicated are the words themselves. The words themselves do not necessarily communicate all of the information that can be conveyed in a real live conversation which the live Internet chat session is trying to model. Typically, in a face to face communication, a person listens to the tone of the communicated words, and observes any associated body language, in order to interpret the meaning of the communication and to gather all of the communicated message. This is absent in chat sessions and instant messaging.
To compensate for this, emoticons are frequently used. Emoticons have emerged in connection with live chat sessions and instant messaging in order to enable a participant to further communicate the participant's tone, emotion, or feelings in connection with any typed words that are communicated. For example, :) is an emoticon which conveys that the participant sending the communication is smiling or happy. This can be used to inflect a sarcastic or joking statement to communicated words. Likewise, the emoticon conveys an “unhappy” emotion such as sadness or disappointment or dislike in something that was communicated. The emoticon :-D may be used to indicate that the person is laughing; and the emoticon ;-) may be used to indicate that what the person said was said with a wink. A wide range of other emoticons are also known and used.
Avatars are also used in chat room software. An avatar is a graphical animation that represents a participant. An avatar comes and goes from the display screen of the participants as the participant that it represents comes and goes from the chat session.
As shown above, emoticons are used frequently in live chat sessions on the Internet to convey gestures, such as a smile, a wink, a frown, etc. Unfortunately, a participant has to first contemplate the type of gesture that the participant is making (e.g., the participant may have to momentarily stop to think “Am I smiling?”, “Is my head nodding in agreement?”, etc.); and then type in a combination of characters to create an emoticon to reflect that gesture. Likewise, for avatars, specific scripts or commands have to be selected by a participant in order to control the presentation or animation of the avatar to the other participants. It would therefore be desirable if gestures could be conveyed in a live chat session or instant messaging communication in a more automated fashion in order to immediately convey the actual gestures being made by a participant. Presently, there has not been a way to automatically convert an actual physical gesture of a participant in a chat-room to a form that can command the chat room software.